Few students look forward to the process of choosing courses. Sifting through major plans, distributive requirements, class hours and off terms is hard enough. Adding to the pain, however, students currently have access to no more than the most basic information about Dartmouth courses.
Across departments, classes vary substantially by size, teaching style, workload and, obviously, subject matter. Yet for students trying to make informed decisions to balance their work while picking interesting and relevant classes, the College's only resources are the vague one-paragraph course summaries and a few old syllabi.
Until a few months ago, students at least still had access to the Student Assembly course guide where some students and recent alumni voluntarily posted reviews. Yet with that resource possibly lost forever ("Students lack access to course evals." Oct. 28, 2010), and a newly-installed private system lacking more than a handful of reviews ("Assembly launches course guide," April 6, 2010), picking courses has become more difficult than playing blindfolded "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" after downing a couple cans of Four Loko.
The truth is that even those course guides have limited use. Due to the voluntary nature of the evaluations, many classes have only one or two reviews, if any. And those that are online fall into two polarized categories: people who loved the given course and people who hated it. The average student's experience is rarely represented. No one can get an accurate understanding of the type of class, the amount of work and the quality of the professor with such a dearth of reliable information.
Yet there is a relatively simple solution to this problem. At the conclusion of every term, Dartmouth requires that students fill out anonymous online course assessments before receiving access to grades. It's time to publicly release the results of these evaluations.
With access to these assessments, selecting courses would no longer be a guessing game. Even if the College kept the free-form comments private, the responses to questions that ask students to rank how "well organized" and "intellectually engaging" the class was, and whether the professor "set high standards" and "explained central concepts clearly" would be tremendously helpful. And if you really wanted to dig deeper, Dartmouth could allow sorting of the responses by other information such as class year, reason for taking the course, expected grade and hours per week spent on coursework. And since the required course assessments have high response rates, the data would be much more accurate than anything done voluntarily.
Plus, transparency would pressure professors to constantly improve. I'm sure most faculty members already pay close attention to their evaluations, but since no one outside of their department sees them, there's little incentive to change especially with the benefit of tenure. If the evaluations were public, the marketplace of classes would only improve as good classes increased enrollment and poor ones adjusted to compete.
Faculty and administrators may fear greater influence of student opinion. In reality, though, the judgment of peers has always been a huge factor in choosing classes whether through the sparse online reviews or in person. Releasing the assessments would have no effect on that dynamic, except to make the advice more accurate. Professors should be more worried about what fallacious and vitriolic guidance students are currently receiving from random disgruntled peers under the current system. The proper, average appraisal of all their students is a much better guide.
This isn't unprecedented. A number of the schools at Cornell University have started making students' end-of-semester evaluations publicly available, and New York University's are open to the world online, where anyone can search by course, instructor or subject.
For all the time and money we expend to get the best possible education, Dartmouth students deserve as much accurate information as the College can provide to help us make informed academic choices. Making course assessments public would be a great first step.
